When you don't have many food options, you work with what you got. Scott DeSimon reflects on eating in Cuba in the 1990s.

Like a lot of adventure-seeking Americans in the late ‘90s, I took advantage of Bill Clinton’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy (not that one, the other one) and spent a couple of weeks in Cuba despite the travel embargo. Back then, and I imagine it’s changed as more European companies moved in to take advantage of our unilateral, short-sighted, now-former ban, it was “charming” in the way that first worlders find countries stuck four decades behind their home country: few cars and many of them “vintage,” dirt roads, crumbling yet majestic colonial architecture, etc. It was, I’m sure, much less charming for the Cubans living with 1950s era infrastructure and a two-tier economy. I’d read a lot about the food situation there (meaning, the lack of). So I went out of my way to explore both the local food “scene,” the tourist one, and the gray market paladares, those quasi-legal, in-home restaurants run by families to bring in a few dollars. It was, in a word, grim. (For a real, devastating account of what eating like an actual Cuban was like, see Patrick Symmes' "Thirty Days as a Cuban.") I remember remarking that everyone was so skinny (I meant this in a good way) and one of the locals we were talking to said, “it’s because everyone is hungry.”

Oh, right.

The tourist hotels in Havana went out of their way to give the appearance of abundance with huge breakfast buffets and “continental” menus—it was papaya season and literally every meal came with platters of papaya—but mostly it was a lot of rice and beans. The official street food stands, meant for Cubans and only purchasable with otherwise worthless Cuban money, sold three things as far as I could tell: pizza (with inevitably rotten cheese), a “ham” (and I use that word loosely) sandwich on a stale roll, and a fruit punch-like drink that tasted of sugar and expired Zarex. Each item was about 10 cents.

It was at the paladares where things got interesting. And it was here that I learned my first lesson: a squirt of lime makes everything better. The paladares served Cuban food recognizable to most Americans—ropa vieja, pernil, platanos maduros, some sort of fish dish—and it was often good. But everything came with a wedge of lime (citrus being relatively easy to come by) to squeeze over it. The hit of acid made everything better and brought out the flavors of the ingredients. It was my first a-ha, chef’s trick moment. When I returned to the U.S., I pretty much adopted the lime wedge as my go-to accompaniment.

The second lesson I learned was on the road. Out of the major cities, it was even slimmer pickings food-wise (locals, however, seemed to have it better because they could grow food and keep a few chickens, protein being the real issue). As a tourist, you basically mapped out your route across the (stunningly beautiful) countryside, hopping from one Soviet-era tourist hotel to another to make sure you could eat and stay somewhere. While there would be the occasional roadside fruit stand selling, what else, papaya, most eating came at the hotels. Each state-run hotel offered the same menu to foreigners: beer and a Cubano sandwich. Over the course of a week driving across the country, I consumed 16 of these sandwiches, always a dollar, and twice as many beers (also, always a dollar). They always tasted good. Which lead me to my second revelation: Melted cheese on bread is a tasty thing. As the father of a three-year-old, Cubanos or even a grilled cheese sandwich, come in handy.

Maybe, just maybe, Obama’s loosening of the embargo leads to the beginning of real change in Cuba, not least of all for its food system and the way the country eats. Like Jamaica, it’s a relatively huge, fertile country that could be producing huge amounts of food for its people (tobacco and sugar cane were both on their way out when I was there almost 20 years ago, so there is available land and skilled farmers). Let’s just hope that before we’re sipping $4 cups of pour-over single origin Cuban coffee, no one in Cuba is having to worry about their monthly ration of rice and sugar anymore.